Christmas in Dogtown (2 page)

~3~

The knock on the
White
Castle
door jarred the walls enough to send a hideous photo of doe-eyed puppies bouncing across the bubblegum-pink carpet, cracking the glass in the frame. Resa kicked it out of the way. This trailer had been redecorated by her mother, without question. Puppies and lace and a dozen shades of of pink. It
had Jeanne written all over it.

“Sorry, Madere’s doesn’t open until nine and…” Damn. She recognized Chan Caillou immediately, but her memories were the “before” picture and the man at the foot of the trailer steps was definitely the “after.” If anyone had told her how he’d grown up and filled out she might have been more interested in Chandler Caillou’s
return to Dogtown.
Or not. She refused to get invested. Dogtown was like quicksand; unless one kept moving, getting stuck was inevitable, followed by sinking and suffocation.

“Theresa Ann Madere. Heard you were back, but wasn’t sure I believed it.” He was taller than Resa remembered. The blond hair was longer and sun-streaked, curling over the collar of his flannel shirt. Way more muscled, in a good way. But the calm, moss-green eyes hadn’t changed, or his quiet way of speaking. “Nice to see you. You look like a city girl now.”

Resa wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but decided to take it as a compliment. “Heard you were back, too. Uncle Aim had a doctor’s appointment this morning over in Gramercy—you need something from the market?”

“Got something for you in the truck.” Chan pointed over his shoulder at a weathered red pickup next to Madere’s back entrance. “The boys brought in a big haul of gar last night—more’n they can use at the restaurant. Thought
Emile might want to smoke ’em.”

Ugh. Resa hated dealing with gar. It ate okay, sort of like catfish, although you’d never find it on the menu of a respectable
New Orleans
restaurant. Cleaning and prepping it to smoke was another matter. It was one ugly monster of a fish.

Folks around here loved it, though. “Sure. Give me a few minutes to get dressed.”

Chan gave her an up-and-down examination, accompanied by a half-smile that looked way too good on him. “Why?”

“Because…” He was right. St. James Parish existed on a different plane of reality than
New Orleans
. Resa Madere the ad executive had transformed back into a Cajun girl running a meat market. Ragged jeans and a long-sleeved Saints t-shirt constituted perfectly acceptable business casual.

“Right.” She closed the trailer door behind her and descended the three wooden steps Uncle Aim had built a few years ago. She’d grown up going in and out of the
White
Castle
via a concrete block, from which she’d regularly fall and scrape her knees. After Pawpaw got gored by the boar, Uncle Aim had moved in her grandparents’ small wooden house that backed onto Roundhead Bayou. Now, the
White
Castle
housed a rotating crew of out-of-work and visiting relatives. Resa really hated that she’d joined the crew.

She and Chan walked to the market side by side. After growing up joined at the hip, they had reached the awkward middle-school age where they didn’t know what to say to each other
and never quite grew out of it.

They were adults now and should at least be able to make small talk.

“Why’d you come back to chase gators?” Resa asked. “I’m sorry to hear about Mike, but last I heard you were up in
Baton Rouge
doing something for the state.” Never mind she only heard it yesterday.

Chan didn’t answer until they’d almost reached the truck. “I had to think about it for a while, but it was my responsibility, you know? Sometimes we’re born into a situation and we have to decide if we’re gonna be a part of it or if we’re gonna put an end to it.”

That was too deep for Resa on a Monday morning. The Caillous and Maderes, like most old families in
South Louisiana
, harbored a broad streak of superstitions and back-bayou philosophies. She’d long ago learned to let the bulk of their mystic pronouncements pass without comment. It was probably a bad sign for Chan that he’d only been back in Dogtown a couple of months an
d was already talking the talk.

Then again, maybe he always had. She didn’t really know him, at least not the adult version of him.

Instead of answering, she helped him lug a long gator-sized cooler out of the pickup’s bed and drag it into the back door of Madere’s. A wash of memories hit her like a physical blow when the heavy screen door slammed behind her and she stood in the prep room. How many summer days had she spent with Uncle Aim back here, learning how to operate the smoker, filling sausage casings and twisting off the ends, committing to memory the different spices for boudin blanc versus crawfish boudin versus boudin noir, and the ratio of meat to r
ice? More than she could count.

They hefted the cooler to the side of a large steel table in the middle of the prep room, and Chan opened it. They’d gotten it on ice f
ast; the fishy smell was faint.

Resa poked at one. “Man, these things are huge.”

“Yeah, and these are the smaller ones.” To free up the fish, Chan scooped handfuls of crushed ice and dropped
them
on the concrete floor near the drain. “We kept the big ones for steaks and gar balls at Caillou’s.”

Uncle Aim had told her once that alligator gar, or “Gator Gar,” were an ancient breed of fish, and she believed it. Local fishermen had caught some as much as eight feet long and fifty years old. They had double rows of nasty-looking teeth along their needle noses—thus, the gator name—and were rumored to attack humans if provoked. Resa had no plans to provoke one.

The gar in Chan’s cooler were of a modest size, only three or four feet. Making a mental note to drive to Gramercy and pick up some thrift-store t-shirts she didn’t mind getting ruined, Resa dug into the crushed ice and wrapped her arms around a fat fish. She managed to pull it out of the cooler before losing her balance and falling hard on the concrete with a lapful of gar.

Chan’s face transformed when he laughed, even though he was laughing at her. His teeth were white and even in his tanned face, and his green eyes sparkled, forming laugh-crinkles at the edges that made Resa give in
to the urge to laugh with him.

She grinned. “I’ve been perfecting that move.”

“I can tell. Let me take it—these babies probably weigh more than fifty pounds apiece.” He leaned over, lifted the big, ugly fish as if it weighed nothing, and set it on the prep table. By the time Resa climbed to her feet and wiped ice and gar juice off her t-shirt, Chan had already pulled the other three out of the cooler. The four monsters lined up like some primeval swamp feast in the making.

“I’ll get my knives and help you clean them and put them in the cooler since Emile’s not here—they’re too heavy for you to handle whole.” Chan assumed she’d agree, trotting off to his truck before she could respond.

Resa sighed, pulled on gloves, dug her uncle’s hatchet and skinning knives out of the cabinets over the table, and chopped the needle-nosed head off the l
argest gar with a single whack.

Three weeks. It was only for three weeks.

~4~

“You are stupid,” Resa told her reflection in the tiny, scratched mirror of the
White
Castle
’s rose-pink bathroom. “Stupid, ridiculous, and absurd.”

She’d been wrestling with her curly black hair for a half hour, and the brown eyes that stared back at her from beneath freshly plucked brows and carefully applied eyeliner looked more jittery than sexy. “And idiotic.”

First, it had been almost a week since Chan had asked her to the Saturday night community dance, popping the question almost shyly as they hacked at the bodies of gigantic dead fish. They’d both been covered in blood and smelled like they’d been rolling in bait, which should have tipped her off that anything in Dogtown re
eking of romance, well, reeked.

Second, her potential date had left immediately after asking her out so he could catch an alligator that had eaten somebody’s poodle in one of those backwater houses near the swamp. He burned rubber out of the Madere’s driveway after making sure he had enough duct tape to wrap around the gator’s jaws. Adequate duct tape was not an attribute she’d ever sought in a man.

Third, they’d both acknowledged that being seen together in public wa
s tantamount to social suicide.

“You know we’re not destined to marry each other, right?” She’d wanted to make sure they were approaching this date from the same perspective. Old friends who’d recently ended up back in their childhood nightmares, in other words. “I’ll be going home in”—she counted in her head—“two weeks and four days.”

“I don’t have plans to marry anybody right now,” he’d assured her.

Later, she realized he hadn’t said he didn’t want to marry someone next week. Or that he didn’t want to marry a gir
l from Dogtown, especially her.

Later, because one has a lot of time to think while making sausages and cooking rice for boudin, she realized he’d been pretty
damned cagey with that answer.

And what had she spent the last hour doing? Going through every bit of clothing she’d brought with her as if preparing for a dinner at Commander’s Palace and not a dance in the back room at Caillou’s, the only place in Dogtown that would hold more than twenty people. For church and s
chool, people drove to Paulina.

“You. Are. Stupid.”

She finally settled on the non-raggedy jeans and a plain black sweater. One could never go wrong with black. Boots. The little gold bear earrings Uncle Aim had given her when she left for college, so she wouldn’t forget where she came from. Like that was possible.

She’d been late closing Madere’s as people from
New Orleans
and all points
e
a
st drove over to buy boudin and andouille. Seemed like every city dweller had a favorite river parish meat market they swore had the best products, and
Madere’s had its share of fans.

When Uncle Aim came back to work on Tuesday, they’d also managed to get Chan’s gar smoked and in the display case, but her uncle had left her to close up today. “Gonna play at the dance,” he said, winking at her. “And watch my girl on the dance floor.”

He was assuming a lot—she hadn’t told him she was attending the dance, much less that she’d be arriving with Chandler Caillou. And dancing was not on her agenda.

A crunch of gravel outside the window told Resa her date had arrived. She hated—absolutely resented—that she had butterflies in her stomach over the prospect of a date with Chan. It was probably the leftover gar balls she’d had for lunch, or the
horror
of what people would think when they walked in together.

She opened the door before he could knock and send more framed puppies to their final resting place. He’d traded the flannel shirt and jeans for a chocolate-brown sweater and cords, and looked good enough to drool
over. The man cleaned up well.

“You look great.” He had a sweet smile and a gentle way about him that had bored Resa as a teenager but appealed to her post-Jules-the-Jerk adult self. “Ready to fire up the Dogtown gossips?”

She sighed. “How do you think people will react?”

Chan opened the truck door for her and waited while she climbed in. After sitting behind the wheel and cranking the engine, he said, “I told my folks we were coming to the dance together and my mom tried to talk me into bringing you a corsage.”

Resa stared at him, waiting for the punch line. His crooked smile was only half joking. “Oh my God. What did you tell her?”

“That I’d turned thirty on Thanksgiving, you weren’t far behind me in age, and you’d probably rather have a gator claw. She said if I gave you a gator claw, she’d be so humiliated the family would have to move to Lutcher.”

Resa buried her face in her hands. “It’s not too late. We could drive across the river and see a movie.”

“Are you serious? If we don’t show up at the dance when we’re expected, our families will be buying baby clothes by New Year’s Eve.”

They caught glances and burst out laughing. Resa shook her head. “Okay, Chandler Caillou and Theresa Madere, on a date. Let’s do it.”

In her imagination, Resa had pictured their entrance into the restaurant banquet room, which spilled into an open backyard filled with tables, benches, and a small stage and dance floor. Christmas lights had been strung around the yard and outlined the door and porch railings. She’d pictured the crowds, the bottles of beer, the platters of food, and the dead silence that would greet her arrival with Chan.

That didn’t happen.

The band—Uncle Aim on fiddle, cousin Mack Madere on squeezebox, and one of the Caillou cousins whose name Resa didn’t know on bass—stopped in the middle of
Jolie Blon
. “Clear the floor!” Uncle Aim shouted into the microphone. “Theresa and
Chandler
need a waltz.”

Resa tried to turn and run, but Chan had a lock-hold on her wrist. “Play along,” he mumbled, pulling her into the center of the suddenly-empty dance floor. “It’ll be worse if we don’t.”

“I don’t remember how to waltz.” Her voice was more hiss than whisper.

Chan gave her a brilliant flash of white teeth, through which he said, “Fake it.”

The little band broke into an easy version of
J’ai Passe Devant Ta Porte
, and Uncle Aim sang. Resa forgot the crowds standing around and instead absorbed the high, keening verses in old Cajun French. The music transported her to the dances when she was a kid and stood on her daddy’s feet while he twirled her around the floor. The “long-short-short, long-short-short, twirl” steps came back to her. When the song ended, the onlookers burst into applause and catcalls. Resa felt her face turning six shades of red.

Chan waved and nodded to everyone as he pulled her inside the banquet room, where it was comparatively quiet. She sat at a table in a dark, empty corner while Chan went to get a couple of beers.

“Abita for your thoughts.” He set the bottle on the table and took the chair across from her.

“Why?” She couldn’t believe she’d never really asked the question before—oh, she’d asked it, but never forced anyone to answer. She’d been too busy dismissing it as stupid. “Why have our families always paired us up? I mean, you’re a great guy, don’t get me wrong. But it’s like ever since we were born, there was just this”—she waved her hands between them—“assumption.”

Chan looked past her, through the back door where the band had resumed
Jolie Blon
and couples of all ages danced in a weekend ritual that went back for generations. “We’re about the same age. We’re Madere and Caillou—hasn’t been a pairing between the families in a long time, not since your dad’s and Emile’s parents.”

“Really?” Resa frowned, mentally ticking through the couples she knew. Sure enough, each one had a Caillou or a Madere, but not both. “Why does it matter?”

Chan didn’t answer for a long time, just looked out at the band and the dancers and the sun sinking into the marshy land to the north. “Maybe it doesn’t.”